connecting

On this episode of TTT, we invite you to meet other teachers who have been using Youth Voices this fall to connect their students.

We shared our plans... dreams... ideas... worries... as we moved into the fall semester.

We hope you enjoy this informal "meet and greet" -- out of which we hope many new connections might grow.

We will be meeting to talk about Youth Voices and how it is (or isn't) fitting into our curriculum often as 2014 kicks off! We gather at EdTechTallk http://edtechtalk.com/ttt each Wednesday at 9PM Eastern /6PM Pacific.

Please plan to join us when you can.

It has been exciting to see the posts and the comments flying into Youth Voices again this fall!

All that is needed is an hour on Wednesday evening, earbuds, and a Google+ account that you can Hangout on.

Come join us for a conversation that could make all the difference for your students!

We are joined by colleagues from England and Australia on this episode of TTT as we follow-up with them on an earler conversations about blogging in elementary schools: http://edtechtalk.com/node/5156.

Our goal is simple: we want to make plans for elementary school students to find and respond to each others blog posts this spring. Joining us on this episode of TTT are Makewaves’ Cliff Manning, KidBlog’s Matt Hardy, Sue Waters from EduBlogs, and some of us are from Youth Voices. We are also joined by David Mitchell, the Quadblogging guru and Linda Yollis an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles who Quadblogs her own way.

The idea is deceptively simple. Four teachers agree to have their students comment on each other's blogs in an organized fashion. Each week, one of the four gets a turn as the spotlight class. The other three classes visit and leave comments. Over the course of a month, every student's work gets read and commented upon. Along the way, students learn about respectful online communication. They may decide to revise their thinking if a commenter shares a perspective they haven't considered.

QuadBlogging is a leg up to an audience for your class/school blog. Over the last 12 months 100,000 pupils have been involved in QuadBlogging from 3000 classes in 40 countries....

A Blog needs an audience to keep it alive for your learners. Too often blogs wither away leaving the learners frustrated and bored. Quadblogging gives your blog a truly authentic and global audience that will visit your blog, leave comments and return on a cycle. Here’s how it works:

You sign up using the form below, shortly after, you will be allocated a Quad four schools/classes including your own. Each Quad has a co-ordinator who is responsible for making sure each of the quad members know what is going on and when. Each week one blog is the focus blog with the other three blogs visiting and commenting during that week. In week two, another school/class blog is the focus with the other three visiting and commenting. This is repeated until each of the classes/schools has had their week in the spotlight. The cycle is then repeated. However, this time, your pupils know what is coming – They will work harder than you have seen them work in order to get content on their blog!

QuadBlogging has been mentioned very highly in recent OfSTED Reports here in the UK and praised for offering opportunities for:“profound impact in developing pupils’ team working, communication and problem-solving skills.”

So you want your K-6 students to blog because you want them to have an audience beyond your classroom. What do you do? Do you set up a blog for each student or for your class, perhaps using http://edublogs.org? Do you join us at http://youthvoices.net or do you join http://kidblog.org ? And there are plenty of other choices.

But here's the rub: How do you get your students' posts out there in the world to get responses from K-6 students like them? How can be build a stronger community of elementary school teachers whose students are blogging together?

We would like to invite you to help us consider some of these questions with the amazing educators on this episode of TTT.

Consider QuadBlogging and other complications around having your own class EduBlog or working in a community like Youth Voices or KidBlog, and the problems and delights of having different ages working together, or not?

Gail Desler and Kevin Hodgson started this conversation in November at NCTE and they would like to see if it might not be possible to get something started with NWP elementary school teachers around some sort of community that gets more and more comments flowing.

Here's Gail's recent email that led us to schedule a TTT around this topic:

I would love to head into the New Year with some shared discussions on creating an elementary community of digital kids/digital writers that would lead into YouthVoices, but would actually be its own community. As I mentioned to both of you at NCTE, I'm spurred on by Suzie Boss's (who will be joining us on TTT) recent Edutopia post: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/quad-blogging-technology-classroom-suzie-boss Just seems like a perfect NWP project - that would be pretty easy to initiate and maintain.

That's not all! On Wednesday, January 9, 2013, we plan a follow-up conversation with many of the same people on this episode. Join us at http://edtechtalk.com/ttt on Wednesday, 1.9.13 at 5PM ET/2PM PT/World Times: http://goo.gl/024pD

Sheri Edwards and Matt Montagne joined Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim on this podcast.

Sheri has been teaching for decades at the Nespelem School, a public school located on the Colville Indian Reservation in Nespelem in the state of Washington, USA. They have 139 students in grades preschool through grade eight.

Sheri is involved in so much that her remarks in this podcast can only be considered an brief introduction to the rich resource that can be found in her work.

We are delighted that some of her students have begun to publish in Youth Voices. For example, west31 writes: "I think wrestling is very competitive and fun because you get to flop people around, show your skills an quickness. Also you don't always use your strength for wrestling, you use smarts against your opponents.

Listen to the podcast, and consider joining us as we journey together in collaborative, digital publishing.

Matt Montagne also join us to tell us more about Earthcast 09, which will be a 24 hour live webcastahon on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009. Matt told us about other projects as well, check out the chat notes, below, to see links to these project as well, including a student webcast the he has been nurturing: Gator Radio Experience

Both Matt and Sheri left us wanting to know more.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

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